Lawmandan said:
Lets see if you can manage a coherent reply without using offensive language or smilies.
Very well, let me invite you to do what I just did and plug "Allen Blade" and also "Allan Blade" (cover both spellings) into the Search This Forum option here, and just to keep you from wasting too many thousands of hours of your life, go to advanced search and restrict it to thread titles. In there, you will find many many threads on our friend, going back several years. Some are praising--which we should fully expect, shouldn't we? After all, he does make a good knife and has obviously filled SOME of his orders or nobody would know that, would they? What you will also find, though, are an equal number of threads, and a VASTLY greater number of posts on those threads from people wondering how he's doing, following the horrible _______ that recently befell him; wondering why their emails aren't being replied to; wondering why they can't get in touch with him; being certain that he'll make good once he gets his feet back under him; starting to get a little perturbed but not wanting to jump to conclusions and just wanting him to tell them what's going on; etc....
I am very sorry if you feel there is a bandwagon here, but bandwagon implies a fad, and fads don't last this long. This person has a very long history of skipping out on people with their money. When confronted with it, he occasionally does turn up, but far from expressing any remorse will fire back at people whose money he accepted for work he never intended to do, telling them--after having ignored their attempts at contacting him for weeks/months--that they should bring this up with him and not just come running to the forums! Go back, and LOOK through these threads! Some of these people defended him forever, and in the end got treated no differently than anybody else.
I made a specific point, as I've posted recently, of experimentally ordering from him last summer---fully aware of all of this, but just as you say, finding out for myself. Hardly any time at all went past before I got the "my daughter needs surgery" email, asking me for money up front but assuring me that whether or not I could do that, it would not affect the timeliness of my order (9 weeks being the original estimate). Now, because of the "bandwagon" here, I was fully cognizant of just how many times his family members have apparently needed life saving surgery, not to mention the number of times he's been robbed, or the USPS has failed him completely--apparently losing entire trucks full of knives in single swipe. As such, I was able to chuckle to myself, not even bother responding to the email, and go about my merry way with my money still in my pocket. Now, mind you, he said "whether or not" I could do it--it's been something in the vicinity of 30 weeks now. Obviously, since I wasn't going to join the Blade's Bladeless fraternity by putting in my lifetime membership fee up front, it wasn't worth his time to bother contacting me anymore or making me a knife.
This was this past summer, dude. He has not changed. He will not change. He WILL always have excuses. Yes, he'll probably fill a few of his orders---this keeps the hope alive. It also keeps a small list of defenders in his corner. If the way he conducts business were anything other than dishonest, he wouldn't NEED defenders. If he had taken money from only one person without intending to fill an order, that still makes him a crook. If a cop steels drugs just once from a crime scene, he's a crook. If a daycare worker rapes just one child, he's a crook. If a man robs just one bank, he's a crook. The fact that that cop, that daycare worker, that man passed by other crime scenes, kids, banks without criminal action does nothing to change it. That said--Allan hasn't just done this once. He has done it time and time again and is still doing it and will KEEP doing it as long as people keep sending him money and hoping for a knife, someday. I'm sorry if our exasperation is annoying to you, but you have to realize that you're just the latest in an extremely long line of lemmings that we've seen walking this same path over and over again, and we find it slightly disturbing that you won't believe us about the cliff.
Martyn@BB said:
...but until that point I suggest you let us do things our way.
A comment I find interesting coming from somebody who has left his own forum where this discussion is NOT taking place, and come to this one.
Let us, in turn, invite you to do the same.
